Radioactive Damage Permeates Our Lives: Heads Up
/By Maggie Gundersen
Where will you be at 7:45 pm EST tonight Monday, June 8 2020?
We hope you will be settling in on Zoom for the Introduction to the Ploughshares Fund annual gala – Chain Reaction: Securing Our Future, at 5 pm Pacific & 8 pm EST.
We at Fairewinds Energy Education hope you will be able to sign in early to see the video of artwork from Mary Lou Dauray’s Nuclear Series.
You’re invited to Ploughshares Fund annual gala this year via Zoom.
Registration is free at: https://www.ploughshares.org/chainreaction2020
“You will also be hearing from a very impressive group of contributors as we all examine some of the current major threats to our global community — nuclear weapons, climate change, and now pandemics.”
The Fairewinds Crew lucky enough to meet Mary Lou Dauray in February 2016 when she contacted Fairewinds Energy Education about our work in Japan and our trips to Fukushima Prefecture to study the migration of radioactivity that Fairewinds helped fund for Arnie Gundersen and Dr. Marco Kaltofen.
Mary Lou Dauray is an internationally noted artist, who
“through her art, wants to emphasize the fact that our planet is threatened by two alarming situations: global human suffering because of the ravages of man-made global warming and total extinction of life brought about by nuclear war. [Emphasis Added]
As an artist who is highly proficient in many mediums, she has the ability to communicate powerful messages while also creating paintings of extraordinary beauty. During the past few years her work focused on the Iraq war, gender inequality, glacial melt, the problem of plastic residue in the oceans, air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and most recently the dangers of radiation. Three years ago she created a series of artworks relating to the very serious, unresolved meltdown and spread of radioactivity from three destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. It was after painting about that multi-level catastrophe that she then decided to devote her painting to a source of nuclear energy, uranium, which is the principal fuel for nuclear reactors and the main raw material for nuclear weapons. She is overwhelmed and concerned about the dangers of a nuclear catastrophe.”
Fairewinds’ work in the atomic power, nuclear waste, and energy arenas is truly daunting at times. Originally, both Arnie and I were nuclear power industry employees, and we met when we worked together on a proposed nuclear power station project in upstate New York in 1977. We were married in 1979 and later we each left the atomic industry, me first in the early 80s, and Arnie in 1990 when he was fired as a nuclear whistleblower. Ultimately, we both became nuclear whistleblowers. I founded the Fairewinds Energy Education Nonprofit in 2008, never anticipating the directions it would grow, the contacts we would develop and the friends we would make worldwide. Our planet is a small one.
In our discussions with Mary Lou Dauray, we have learned that she uses art in the way we use science and words to tell the truth about the human perspective of life on earth in the time of a global climate emergency, Pandemic 2020, and the ongoing migration of radioactivity from five major meltdowns in 40-years as well as numerous other radioactive releases, chemical spills, plastic pollution, etc.
Each one of us at Fairewinds has favorite pieces of artwork produced by Mary Lou Dauray. This one, entitled, Nuclear Winter, from the Heads Series is a 13”h x 9.5”d x 5.5”w, Acrylic and mixed media – Published in 2013 is Arnie’s favorite from the Heads Series (pictured below).
It is not just radioactive damage that permeates every aspect of our lives, but the pristine environment of our precious world is heavily contaminated by so many industries and pathways, that they are truly too numerous to name. Look at the BP oil spill for example that continued unabated in the Gulf of Mexico for years, and now that oil and its dispersant are slowly destroying the marshlands, oyster and shrimp beds, contaminating the fish we all love to eat from the Gulf and actually polluting the whole Gulf Coast as the oil and dispersal chemicals spread out.
Don’t think these environmental catastrophes affect you? What do you eat, drink, breathe? Your food, water and air are contaminated and that contamination is spreading around the globe as it damages our bodies and actually changes our DNA, meaning that the people following us… our grandchildren and their children and grandchildren begin to become a different human species.
Look at Mary Lou Dauray’s artwork. The depth and breadth of Mary Lou’s artistic talent to capture the human perspective is astonishing. You will find yourself inspired and moved by Ms. Dauray’s breathtakingly beautiful series on our National Parks to her crushingly honest and graphic illustrations and depictions of the ravages of the atomic industry to the plagues of coal and plastics!
If Ms. Dauray’s artistic vision and Ploughshares factual discussions don’t motivate each of you to work to protect our world from the ongoing industrial calamities, I don’t know what will. Please join Mary Lou Dauray and Ploughshares on Zoom tonight!
Do this for yourself, your children, your grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and all the life living on this little dot in the Milky Way.
Radiation Knows No Borders and Fairewinds Energy Education will keep you informed.
